Conceptualizing protective family context and its effect on substance use: Comparisons across diverse ethnic-racial youth

Abstract

Background: Although family behaviors are known to be important for buffering youth against substance use, research in this area often evaluates a particular type of family interaction and how it shapes adolescents’ behaviors, when it is likely that youth experience the co-occurrence of multiple types of family behaviors that may be protective. Methods: The current study (N = 1716, 10th and 12th graders, 55% female) examined associations between protective family context, a latent variable comprised of five different measures of family behaviors, and past 12 months substance use: alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and e-cigarettes. Results: A multi-group measurement invariance assessment supported protective family context as a coherent latent construct with partial (metric) measurement invariance among Black, Latinx, and White youth. A multi-group path model indicated that protective family context was significantly associated with less substance use for all youth, but of varying magnitudes across ethnic-racial groups. Conclusion: These results emphasize the importance of evaluating psychometric properties of family-relevant latent variables on the basis of group membership in order to draw appropriate inferences on how such family variables relate to substance use among diverse samples.

Keywords:

• Adolescence
• substance use
• family dynamics
• ethnicity

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Peter Batra, Meredith House, Kyle Kwaiser, Kathleen LaDronka, and Rebecca Loomis and the U-M Survey Research Operations staff for their generous support. Portions of these data were presented at the 2017 Society for Research in Child Development biennial meeting (Austin, TX).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research was, in part, support by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD; grant: R01 HD075806; D.P. Keating, Principal Investigator).